Respecting our Manuscript Authorities, the first fact claiming emphatic notice is, that while in the case of the classic poets, philosophers and historians, the extant manuscript copies are numbered by tens and sometimes even by units, those of the Scriptures are numbered by hundreds. Of the New Testament alone nearly eighteen hundred manuscripts have been catalogued and more or less carefully examined. Of these 685 are manuscripts of the Gospels, 248 contain the Acts and Catholic Epistles, 298 the Pauline Epistles, and 110 the Apocalypse; 428 are Lectionaries or service books of the Greek church, 347 of which contain passages from the Gospels and 81 passages from the Acts and the Epistles. Thus while our knowledge of the interesting narratives of Herodotus is dependent upon five or six authorities only, and the history of Livy upon eight or nine only (and none of these contain the whole even of the portions extant),[77] our knowledge of the life and words of our Lord is drawn from over a thousand manuscript authorities, and of which the larger part contain the whole of the four Gospels. In antiquity again the manuscripts of the New Testament far surpass those of classical authors. Few, if any, of the latter are older than the ninth or tenth century, while of the former we have copies belonging to the fourth and fifth centuries. The oldest manuscripts are written in capital letters, and on this account are called uncial[78] manuscripts, or briefly uncials. Later manuscripts are written in a smaller character, and in a style approaching to what we call a running hand, and are hence named cursives. Of uncial manuscripts, containing portions of the New Testament, one hundred and fifty-eight have been examined and catalogued. Some of the most valuable of these have been published under the superintendence of careful editors. Others have been thoroughly examined, and their variations so faithfully noted and recorded, that a private student is, for most practical purposes, placed in the same position as the possessor of the manuscript itself. This work is technically described as _collation_, and the amount of painstaking labour spent upon the collation of Biblical manuscripts during the past two hundred years, and especially in the last forty or fifty years, is simply enormous. To one who has never examined a document written many centuries ago it is difficult to convey any adequate notion of the amount of time and labour involved in the collation even of a single manuscript. The unusual and varying forms of the letters, the indistinctness of the characters, the various contractions employed by the scribe, and, as is the case with our most ancient documents, the non-separation of word from word, and the absence of stops, render the mere task of deciphering the manuscript very difficult and painfully wearying to the eyes.[79] Much watchful attention is also demanded, as well as a good knowledge of the language, in making